Worldpay users are still having significant difficulties with millions of daily payments that have been blocked by a technical outage at the UK payment processing firm, which joined the FTSE 100 index after its initial public offering last year, in one of the largest IPOs for a UK fintech.

Despite promising its clients that it will resolve the software issues, Worldpay is still unable to put an end to ongoing technical glitches after more than three weeks.

Although technical issues and temporary outages are common with other payments providers, they rarely last more than a few hours or days, even if less than 1% of clients have been affected, according to the company. And in such a competitive ecosystem, this could be hugely threatening to Worldpay and its clients, with big names among them such as British Airways and the National Lottery. The incident has already prompted thousands of the merchant’s clients to question Worldpay’s payment processing efficiency.

False Reassurance

Worldpay Group (LON:WPG) has attempted to play down the problem but the list of angry customers expands and risks creating a backlash against the company which processes more than 36 million daily payments.

“Worldpay is aware of an isolated issue impacting one of our gateways, resulting in a delay to settlement for a small number of our customers,” said the company in a statement issued on its website earlier this month. “We are working to resolve this issue urgently and we have proactively communicated with all affected customers,” they added.

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Customers of New York-based Etsy, a handmade goods e-commerce site, reported that they had experienced duplicate charges as a result of the payments processor’s efforts to fix an earlier problem. The users of the US online crafts marketplace have suffered similar delays with payment disbursements from Worldpay earlier in February.

Furthermore, Etsy isn’t the only customer getting hit with Worldpay’s ongoing problems. Online gambling site Stan James and the National Lottery are getting their share of trouble as well. Stan James said that it cannot pay players their winnings and had reported the problem to the Financial Conduct Authority. Furthermore, the National Lottery has stated on Twitter that it is working closely with Worldpay to fix the problem after a customer complained about waiting more than eight days for a refund of more than £1,000.

£400m Investment!

According to a Financial Times report, the error was caused by an overload of error messages on one of Worldpay’s servers caused by a recent software update. The server has consequently been taken offline and the outstanding payments are being reconciled manually until the server is back up and running.

While the company prides itself on its new platform, which has cost £400 million in a bid to cover more than 325 international payment methods, the glitch will no doubt be an embarrassment for investors and users alike.

Despite all of the above difficulties, Worldpay’s share had its ‘neutral’ rating reissued by JPMorgan Chase & Co., and the latter also suggested in a report last week a potential upside of 0.11% from the current price. Meanwhile Etsy, one of the most affected customers, has seen its share price fall by almost 3.5% over the last five trading days, while Worldpay’s share price remains largely unaffected by the issue for the same period.